"Just as I thought."
A little over a minute had passed since leaving the Jalis Workshop.
Though Egginis was large enough to be called a quasi-city, it was still a single town—and at Seto's flight speed, they reached the Slum District in no time at all.
What greeted Rei upon his return was the sight of golems advancing through the district, destroying everything in their path.
There were more than ten of them.
Ten golems wasn't particularly threatening as far as Rei was concerned.
But that was strictly from his perspective.
For the majority of those living in the Slum District, a swarm of golems like that would be a hopeless foe.
Some among the residents had once been adventurers, so it wasn't as though the district lacked combat power entirely. There were also those who, former adventurers or not, made their living by attacking others.
For people like that, golems were not opponents they could defeat so easily.
The former adventurers had left the profession for one reason or another—most commonly, a lack of ability or limbs that had become unusable mid-request—making them difficult to rely on in a fight.
And even those who preyed on others might manage against a humanoid monster like a Goblin, but golems were another matter entirely. Not just ordinary golems, either—these were Dolan Workshop golems, the highest-performance models in all of Egginis.
Their sizes varied, ranging from roughly three meters to about five, clearly massive compared to any human.
That said, what Rei could confirm were only the golems that stood taller than the surrounding buildings or marched openly along the roads. If there were golems closer to the size of a Goblin lurking about, noticing them would be far more difficult.
(The troublesome part is that they're golems.)
If these were ordinary monsters or creatures, sensing their presence wouldn't be impossible.
But golems were inorganic, which made detecting anything like a presence from them exceedingly hard.
(They use human souls to make the cores. You'd think that'd at least give them some kind of presence.)
Despite that gripe, the moment they passed over a golem, Rei leapt from Seto's back.
Directly below him as he fell was, naturally, a golem.
It had the appearance of an enlarged knight, its entire body encased in metallic armor.
(Since it's a Dolan Workshop golem, that armor isn't ordinary metal either—it's probably made of some kind of magic metal.)
Analyzing the approaching golem, he drew Death Scythe and the Twilight Spear from his Misty Ring.
Then, carrying the full speed of his descent, he swung Death Scythe down toward the golem's crown.
The golem raised its giant sword directly overhead upon sensing Rei's attack—a swift judgment, for a golem.
Undoubtedly swift, but the weapon's quality was nowhere near enough to stop Death Scythe's strike.
Given that the golem wore what appeared to be magic metal armor, the sword it held was naturally not ordinary metal either; it was highly likely to be magic metal as well.
But a magic metal of the caliber a golem wielded could never block the strike of Death Scythe, which was fueled by Rei's vast—truly inhuman—magic power. The longsword's blade was severed effortlessly, and without any further resistance, the scythe cleaved clean through from the head down to the groin, splitting the golem perfectly in half.
With a heavy thud, the two halves crumbled to the ground.
Rei swiftly stored them in his Misty Ring, and a thought suddenly struck him.
(Ah, come to think of it, I was able to store the golem as-is. So maybe I didn't need to destroy it in the first place? I could've just touched it and stored it directly in the Misty Ring... no, that won't work. There's no telling how it would react when I took it back out.)
Storing a golem that was still free to move and then releasing it later—there was no way to predict what it would do.
Since that was unknown, Rei concluded it was better to destroy the golem before storing it after all.
Alternatively, a more straightforward approach would be to store golem after golem, take them outside the city, and destroy them if they went on a rampage—but...
(Thinking about the people whose souls ended up as material for those cores, destroying the golems really is better than taking them alive, huh.)
A faint smile crossed his face at the fact that the phrase "taking them alive" had surfaced in his mind regarding golems. Then he searched for his next prey.
From what he'd seen atop Seto's back in the sky, there had been a fair number of golems scattered about. That was precisely why he expected to find the others quickly... and in fact, he spotted another one almost immediately.
More precisely, he spotted a golem in the middle of destroying a building.
At first he wondered why it was tearing down buildings, but the golems' targets were Anne and the others, whom Rei had taken away, or Ilunara and his fellow non-mainstream faction alchemists from the Dolan Workshop.
Since they didn't know exactly where the people they were searching for were hiding, destroying buildings and checking whether their targets were among those fleeing the wreckage was only natural from the golems' perspective.
If the golems had possessed egos, they might well have grown sick of the task, wondering whether they really needed to demolish every single building in the Slum District this way.
But the golems, of course, had no ego.
Or rather, considering that the cores were made using human souls, Rei couldn't help but wonder slightly whether the golems might have some sense of self—but from what he could see of the ones destroying buildings, there was no sign of anything like that.
(Though what they're doing does require fairly advanced judgment to pull off. In that respect, you'd expect nothing less from Dolan Workshop golems. ...Not that it isn't precisely because they use human souls.)
There was no doubt the mainstream faction of the Dolan Workshop possessed high-level technical skill as well, but given the current situation, the shock of learning they used human souls far outweighed any admiration for their craftsmanship. It would have been strange not to attribute the golems' capabilities to that factor rather than mere technology.
"Anyway, the next one is that golem."
The one Rei had just destroyed was a knight-type, but the next one he set his sights on wore no visible equipment—which, if anything, made it appear more agile.
One thing he could say for certain was that, unlike the golems he had encountered before made of sand, mud, or water, every one of these was properly humanoid, closely resembling a giant doll.
(A side effect of using human souls?)
The question crossed his mind.
The human souls used as golem cores naturally no longer retained any ego.
But even so, since the golems were driven by human souls, he figured there might be an inevitability to their humanoid form.
Then again, when Rei had invaded the Dolan Workshop, the golems created by Ilunara and the other non-mainstream faction members had included Water Golems made of actual water.
(No, but Ilunara and the others never suspected the cores they were using contained human souls. And the mainstream faction would never teach their rivals how to use those cores to produce high-performance golems.)
Watching the approaching golem, Rei weighed the question... then decided that killing the enemy took priority over pondering, and hurled the Twilight Spear at it.
The spear, imbued with Rei's magic power, punched through the golem's body in an instant.
The golem had no chance to react. With its chest pierced, it toppled to the ground.
...Crashing into what could only be called the rubble of a nearby building and completely demolishing it in the process—though fortunately, no one appeared to have been hiding there.
Rei swiftly closed the distance and stored the golem's massive body in his Misty Ring.
"That makes two. The rest are..."
Golems were valuable merchandise under normal circumstances.
And since these were Dolan Workshop golems, they would fetch a high price if sold.
But that assumed one had the right connections.
Without them, anyone trying to sell these golems could count themselves lucky if they were merely robbed. In the worst case, they could be captured and have their own soul used as material for a golem core.
Granted, with the altar used for necromancy safely stored in Rei's Misty Ring, using souls as material was probably no longer possible.
Still, if a Slum District resident ended up in such a situation, it would leave a bad taste in Rei's mouth.
To prevent that, he intended to recover as many Dolan Workshop golems as he could.
That said, Rei wasn't acting purely out of goodwill. He also figured Dolan Workshop golems might prove useful for something later, and he wanted to destroy the cores as quickly as possible.
"The next one is... a bit farther off."
From the sky, the golems in the Slum District hadn't appeared that far apart.
But that was from an aerial view. Down on the ground, confirming their positions firsthand, the golems were actually spaced considerably apart.
Naturally.
The Dolan Workshop needed to capture Anne, Ilunara, and the others as quickly as possible, and for that purpose, there was no need to mass the golems in one location.
Deploying them at fixed intervals to search for Anne and the others was undoubtedly more efficient.
Rei understood that, which meant he needed to move fast and take the golems down.
"Seto! Take out the golems rampaging through the Slum District! And secure their bodies as much as you can once they're down!"
"Grrrrrrl!"
Seto, soaring overhead, let out a cry of acknowledgment.
Finding something reassuring in that sound, Rei broke into a run toward a golem located a moderate distance away.
As expected of the Slum District, the roads were terrible.
Fragments of buildings, garbage, and in some cases rusted, broken longswords and other weapons lay scattered across the ground as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
Grimacing at the awful footing, Rei charged toward the nearest golem from his current position.
In this situation, golems that stood taller than the buildings were easy to spot—a small mercy.
...Though to those under attack, a golem assault was anything but a laughing matter.
Rei ran along the ground, occasionally using his Sleipnir boots to bound through the air to dodge obstructive obstacles—until something caught his attention.
"Hm?"
He muttered it and came to a halt.
His gaze was fixed on a golem visible in the distance.
That alone wouldn't have been particularly noteworthy, but its position appeared to be growing steadily more distant.
At first he thought it was his imagination—but when he climbed atop the roof of a half-collapsed building, it became unmistakably clear that his assumption had been correct.
The golems had begun moving, as if to exit the Slum District.
"What's going on? No, no need to think too hard about it. I came back faster than they expected."
If the attack on the Jalis Workshop had been meant to stall Rei—or, in the best-case scenario for the attackers, capture him—then whoever orchestrated this hadn't anticipated he'd return to the Slum District this quickly.
And Dolan Workshop golems were extraordinarily expensive.
The Workshop surely hadn't wanted to use their own creations for something like this in the first place.
But to recover the altar Rei had stolen, they had no choice but to take Anne or Ilunara hostage.
To secure those hostages, they had deployed the golems.
Adventurers had been sent to the Slum District a few times already, but they'd been swiftly cut down by Rei or set upon by the residents—perhaps leading the Workshop to conclude they were useless.
Even setting that aside, the prospect of potentially having to fight Rei the Alias-Bearer must have made few adventurers willing to accept the job.
So they'd unleashed the golems instead—but with two of them destroyed in the blink of an eye, an alchemist watching from somewhere—or perhaps detecting the destruction through some other means—had likely ordered a withdrawal.
It was only conjecture, but Rei didn't think he was far off the mark.